Surgical Guides and the Elegance of the Limiting Design

Surgical guides for dental implants offer a number of essential benefits to dentists, oral surgeons, and patients. Chief among these is convenience: when you can plan a complex surgery completely digitally first, you are far less likely to make a mistake, and far more likely to complete the job perfectly.

But safety is surely the other great benefit of dental surgical guides, and here is where the type of guide matters tremendously. Dental guides come in several forms, and may include one or many features designed to ensure accuracy in the operating room.

Scan Implant Guide offers what are known as “limiting designs,” which means that our guides simply disallow drill holes anywhere they shouldn’t go. They also prevent punctures with drill stops that mitigate the depth of each implant, a process defined here:

Completely limiting design restricts all of the instruments used for the osteotomy in a buccolingual and mesiodistal plane. Moreover, the addition of drill stops limits the depth of the preparation, and thus, the positioning of the prosthetic table of the implant. As the surgical guides become more restrictive, less of the decision-making and subsequent surgical execution is done intraoperatively. This includes 2 popular designs: cast-based guided surgical guide and computer-assisted design and manufacturing (CAD/CAM) based surgical guide.

Taken together, safety features such as these represent a watershed in the safety and reproducibility of dental implant surgery procedures. To try the best surgical guide system in the nation, we urge you to reach out to the experts at Scan Implant Guide.